Dsxyliea - <AUTHOR> http://geon.github.io/programming/2016/03/03/dsxyliea <comment><USER2> This reminds me of the meme that went around a few years ago (dear god, 2003!?), claiming that Cambridge researchers showed that you had no trouble reading scrambled word text:

      "Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe."

Of course, it later circulated that you could absolutely make hard-to-read scrambled text, it really depended what words and how scrambled.

Anyhow, because the Internet is magic, an _actual_ researcher from Cambridge has since posted a more thorough examination of the phenomenon, with counter- examples and proper citation:

[http://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/people/matt.davis/cmabridge/](http://www.mrc- cbu.cam.ac.uk/people/matt.davis/cmabridge/)

<comment><USER3> I would guess part of the reason why native speakers (and probably fluent speakers) can read that text is because of linguistics probability (Bayesian probability). Humans seem to use probability of phrases to fill in blanks in speech/reading.

For example, if you see/hear the phrase "I am" there is a pretty high chance that the next word is one of the following: an adjective, the person's name, a/an or here because of syntax. Or if someone says "would you like a cup of", you can guess that the next word is likely some sort of liquid because that is what goes in a cup. Similarly, you can sometimes finish other people's sentences because of probability.

The word scrambling breaks down, as mentioned in the link, with ambiguous words where changing the order makes it look like another word and unfamiliar words.

<comment><USER4> I don't know why most people can read scrambled words. I have no proof to what I am going to propose.

I had a horrid time learning how to read. I had a worse time learning how to spell.

It all changed around the end of 3rd grade. What changed! I just memorized what the words looked like visually. You could misspell a word/words, and it didn't matter. I was looking at what a word looked like visually. Even now, I have no problem understands typos/misspelling, and never see the need to correct someone.

I have a feeling there are many people out there who are reading like myself. I don't know, just have a feeling. I do transpose letters in in writing, but I don't think I'm I have dyslexia.

Once I realized my process of reading, I caught up to the other kids. I say my process. It's probably everyone's process. I really don't know. All I know is the way I was taught to read was useless. I was never taught how to memorize, other than route repetition. Route repetition didn't work for myself. Even today I know what 8 X 8 is by visualizing the 64.

It looks like most of you breezed through high school, and college. So you don't need to know what helped me.

What helped me in learning was visualizing. In college, I took notes once. I tried to make each page look visually different. I usually drew doodles, or detailed drawings all over the pages. For instance, when I needed to memoririze all the parts of the Femur bone, I drew the bone on the page and labeled all the areas I needed to know. Even years later, I can bring up that page in my head. And no, I don't have a idetic memory. It's just the way I got through school.

I definetly had a learning problem. The specialists at the time offered no help.

I got off topic, but if you have, or know of a kid who's not keeping up in school, pass on this visualization method. It's simple. You don't need to pay for a course. It's easy concept.

(By the way, I'm still not a natural reader. I'm not the guy who can just pick up a book(fiction), and zip through it. I find myself losing my place on the page. I sometimes need to put my finger on the line I'm reading. My mind starts to wander. Although, if the author is a skilled writer, like Nabrakov; I have no problem getting through the book?

I don't have this problem when reading most non-fiction? It could be I just don't like a lot of fiction?)

<comment><USER5> °°°[ This sounds much like an ancient method for politicians and other public speakers to remember their speeches in the days before paper and literacy were so common - they would visualize their speech as a house, and every topic is another room. Giving their speech was as simple as waking thru all the rooms in the house they imagined. ]°°°

>>>[ Do words of different colors help you visualize the differences? Like how some IDEs highlight a languages keywords or italicize comments? ]<<<

===[ Also, have a visual reminder of this comment. ]===

<comment><USER6> Actually, this has a name in neuro-psychology: Method of loci [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci)

It's actually fairly ancient, and unfortunately not studied enough.

<comment><USER7> Except.. it is! By a fairly 'ancient' group of men: "I want to make clear to you is that such memory training techniques are not new. Whether used by actors, students, public speakers or Freemasons, some techniques go back to antiquity. Before the invention of printing, when manuscripts had to be copied by hand, writing materials were scarce and expensive, and many could not read and write, a trained memory was a valuable asset. Thus, ancient orators, aided by teachers of rhetoric, taught techniques enabling orators, politicians, priests, and others to memorize large amounts of material in great detail."

[http://www.freemasons-freemasonry.com/memory- freemasonry.htm...](http://www.freemasons-freemasonry.com/memory- freemasonry.html)

<comment><USER6> It is in fact studied, and I admit my "not studied enough" remark is indeed, wrong. There were about 150 papers citing method of loci since 2015: [https://scholar.google.fr/scholar?as_ylo=2015&q=%22method+of...](https://scholar.google.fr/scholar?as_ylo=2015&q=%22method+of+loci%22&hl=en&as_sdt=1,5&as_vis=1)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is uncannily similar to my own personal experience with ADHD. Instead of words appearing scrambled, though, my focus during reading is drawn to random words within a text. I might skip to a new sentence or jump down a few paragraphs; it's entirely arbitrary. This process usually continues forward and back, resetting every few seconds. The longer I read something, the worse the effect becomes. It takes a lot of effort to get through things sometimes.

Whatever this effect is, it is somewhat lessened by adequate sleep, a low- sugar diet, and prescribed medication. It never completely goes away, though. I have good days and bad days; even at my best, though, working through long texts, papers, or technical literature will eventually cause my mind to wander. Whatever this is (I blame ADHD), it's prevented me from ever being able to _enjoy_ reading literature or long-form journalism. It's a pity, too, because I enjoy the content. The task itself is just too mentally stressful. Reading is, sadly, a form of labor.

It's weird, because skimming comes easily. Visual forms of information are also incredibly easy to digest.

Do others with ADHD have a similar problem with this?

<comment><USER9> Wow, that sounds very familiar. I find that when I try to dive into long texts, even (especially?) those that I find very interesting and which I'm intent on finishing, my mind wanders off onto wild tangents within a few paragraphs. When I find something interesting that sparks another thought, I'll trail off on that thought instead of filing it away for later. I'll continue to read the words without even realizing that I'm not absorbing any of the content, which means that I'll sometimes need to re-read a passage three or four times. It's incredibly frustrating. You're right that skimming is surprisingly easier, though. I find that if I try to blaze through a passage and read only some of the words, my recall is often _better_ than if I'd tried to read at my normal pace. Less chance to focus on something else.

I used to love reading books as a kid, but I started with the above somewhere around high school. I think that the steady stream of novel (and thus exciting) information available on the internet has had an detrimental impact, but of course that can't be all of it. Still, I've lately been trying to limit the quantity of information that I _attempt_ to take in by, say, opening only one or two news articles or HN links (instead of every one that looks interesting), and I've felt more clear-headed since.

May I ask when you put a name to the problem and started with medication?

<comment><USER10> Exactly the same problem here as both you and GP comment: my eyes jump around paragraphs quickly scanning for keywords/phrases to hook into. And if it's an interesting passage, I can't get very far without my mind drifting off on my own tangent, and I end up having to re-read a few times like you.

I also find reading tiring even though I can read quite fast, because I want to read each sentence properly, so I keep going over the text. It's a little obsessive-compulsive I guess.

Is this common with ADHD?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Ugh, as someone with dyslexia, it's nothing visual, so trying to visualize being dyslexic is an exercise in futility.

You know those "drunk" googles that distort your view? They certainly make it harder to walk, but they in no way make you feel drunk...

Try explaining someone what it feels like being on LSD... you can't.

Telling people that letters jump around is an easy way to dismiss people whit out having to do a lengthy and tiring explanation that likely wont be understood anyway.

I do appreciate the effort that went into this, and that people try to understand, but I don't think this particular experiment is helpful, because people will get the wrong idea about what dyslexia is.

Edit: Arzh is right in that I'm being a bit harsh/dramatic here, so I made some small changes.

<comment><USER12> I am dyslexic, and just for some background info I have uncorrected 20/20 vision but my symptoms are exacerbated by comorbid ADHD. I'm sure everyone experiences it differently, but the image on the left is a pretty close approximation of what I often see when trying to read from a page:

[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9c/Dyslexic...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9c/DyslexicVision.png)

Say I was reading the line "...as well as other perceptual tasks." I would insert words from inside the "circle" so it would appear to me like "23 other reading tasks" or something (often times it will make no sense, which is my cue that I need to re-read the whole thing).

Other times I might just read a word like "presidental", then look back at it and suddenly it says "prudential" as if it changed when I wasn't looking at it (and I'd _swear_ I knew it said 'presidential' the first time).

Writing and typing are a whole other can of worms that I won't open here, but suffice it to say that I've never experienced the dancing letters like in the OP.

<comment><USER13> uhh... I'm sitting here wondering if I'm mildly dyslexic. I often swap letters around when typing, read words that aren't there, leave words out, etc... I've always had this problem and just assumed I didn't proof-read well enough.

Is there a test for mild dyslexia? How would one know for sure? Should I care? I doesn't bother me much other than people thinking I have terrible grammar and reading comprehension skills.

<comment><USER14> I'm also interested if there is some sort of test. I find myself doing many of these things when I read long passages.

One other thing that is very common for me, but I'm not sure if it is related to dyslexia or not, is that I will frequently either forget the next word I was about to say or say the wrong word without noticing. An example of the latter would be if I am filling the dishwasher I'll say that I finished the laundry, or I'll refer to shaving in the morning as mowing. These happen to me on an almost daily basis.

<comment><USER15> This frequently happens to me. A few times a conversation if I'm not focusing solely on the conversation. It's interesting that the words switched are often related: in your example, mowing is another form of cutting protruding fibers aka shaving.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> There are a variety of different forms of Dyslexia, so I can't speak for everyone. However, this doesn't resemble my own personal form. I would be curious to hear from other Dyslexics to see if this is anything close to their experience.

The way I usually explain my variety is that my brain is trying to read faster than it can physically. I have no problem reading words (which seems to be what this code is focusing on), the problem is my brain is already moving forward and the word I _read_ is often not the word written on the page. Sometime I can make the contextual correction in my head while other times I have to reread the sentence to make any sense of it. In that instance, I can understand the "jumping around" description as I can read a sentence for a second time and suddenly my brain will see a different word than it saw the first time.

<comment><USER17> I have a genetic condition which makes my corpus callosum (the part of the brain that connects the two halves) small(er).

This leads (as described by my doctor) both halves processing data and then having trouble syncing. I don't really know if that's true or not. However, it runs in my family (we have taken genetics tests) and it turns out that's why we are neither right or left handed, and we all have various issues related to spelling, geometry, etc. We also have an increased risk of schizophrenia and alzheimer's, but increased IQ according to studies.

For me it manifests itself mostly dyslexia. My brain gumbles words, and I don't realy left to right directly, I pretty much read a sentence and have to put it together in my head. Spelling is awful, and thank god for spellcheck, I can't remember names randomly or other words for things. The weird part is adjectives and pronouns are fine. I just have an issue with nouns if I cannot see an object.

The other day, I had to describe a toaster to my wife because I couldn't remember the word "toaster". Same goes with countless other things.

My grandfather, mother, and brother all have this issue. However, it did manifest differently for each of us. For my brother he can't think in 3 dimensions very easily. My mother has Dyslexia and my grandfather can't spell....

<comment><USER18> I have a similar thing. When i did the battery of SPED tests in elementary school they mentioned something about the two halves not communicating as well. What you talk about not remembering names really strikes a chord with me. Interesting to know what its called. Not that i'm sure I have the same thing but definitely seems similar.

<comment><USER16> If I ever found the time, it might be interesting to revisit some of those tests as an adult. I haven't really spoken to a professional expert about my Dyslexia since I was diagnosed at 8. I doubt I could really articulate what I was experiencing at the time and nearly everything that was mentioned to me has long been forgotten. I'm sure going through the same process as an adult would offer some interesting insight.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Having dyslexia, I would say this is rather extreme, I can't speak for everyone but reading isn't like this for most dyslexics.

Usually it is a pair of letters being swapped, or numbers order reversed. They don't jump around/change randomly, you just misread it.

[http://dyslexia.learninginfo.org/symptoms.htm](http://dyslexia.learninginfo.org/symptoms.htm)

The new font for dyslexics also goes into this some more: [http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/new-font-helps- dys...](http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/new-font-helps-dyslexics- read/)

<comment><USER20> Dysgraphia is a part related to dyslexia.

This can be a problem, b d p q 9, W M N, O 0 o e, E 5 S R B and more.

<comment><USER18> Did the parent originally talk about dysgraphia? Because while I have pretty serious dysgraphia I'm not really dyslexic. While related they're pretty significantly different. One of my best friends growing up had dyslexia and with my dysgraphia we always joked about being one 'normal' person.

<comment><USER20> No. At age 60, when I was 12 they really didn't have a name for any of this. For years my school records had be as retarded. It was not until I taught myself calculus and trig in the 8th grade that my parent new something was wrong and sent teaching specialists at OU. They a used the word dyslexia. This was all very new in the 60s.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Fun fact: Dyslexia in Chinese is anatomically different than Dyslexia in English - so you may be dyslexic in English, but function fine in Chinese: [http://www.economist.com/blogs/analects/2014/09/dyslexia- chi...](http://www.economist.com/blogs/analects/2014/09/dyslexia-chinese)

</comment><comment><USER22> According to Alice Wellborn, a dyslexia expert of some note: Many years ago, researchers believed that dyslexia was a visual perceptual problem - that it was based in how a person saw letters and words. Now we know for sure, through brain imaging studies, that dyslexia is a problem in the language system of the brain, not the visual system.

Dyslexia is the result of a significant weakness in the phonological processing system, or how a person's brain understands and can use the sound- based reading "code". A dyslexic reader has difficulty cracking that code.

Here are some important facts about dyslexia:

Dyslexia is based in how a person's brain functions. The brain structure is normal - the glitch is in the wiring. Fluent readers use a part of the brain for reading that dyslexic readers do not use. This means that reading remains a slow, laborious process for children and adults with dyslexia.

Dyslexia is not related to a person's level of intelligence. Many children and adults with dyslexia are gifted, highly accomplished, creative people.

<comment><USER23> However some kinds can be corrected like visual problems. I know a guy with dyslexia who uses very specific, slightly tinted (towards green) lenses in his glasses. I can't remember what else was different about them, but basically they were very personalised and had the effect of slowing down the eye movement over the text. (as in, it forced him to track the lines normally instead of jumping around) Based on chat experience, they made a lot of difference.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Shameless plug: if you know anyone with Dyslexia or other learn & attention issues, send them to [https://www.understood.org](https://www.understood.org). It's a non-profit with many free resources for people trying to overcome these challenges.

<comment><USER25> My father has trouble reading despite being really smart otherwise, and unfortunately it's gotten him to think he's not smart. I'd love to show this to him, but my only concern is that everything is geared towards parents to help their children, and I don't want to demean him with that. are there any similar resources geared towards adults?

<comment><USER24> Try the International Dyslexia Association, they have branches all over: [http://eida.org/ida-branches/](http://eida.org/ida-branches/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> For extra fun, imagine you're reading in a language where the characters look like 紫 and sometimes the lines decide to wiggle like Medusa's hair.

<comment><USER21> posted above, but it's different for Chinese speakers than English people with dyslexia: [http://www.economist.com/blogs/analects/2014/09/dyslexia- chi...](http://www.economist.com/blogs/analects/2014/09/dyslexia-chinese)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I actually don't have much difficulty reading this, with the exception of a couple technical terms I wasn't familiar with. There was a similar thread a while back with a couple different fun examples, albeit designed to show how we read based on the shape of words (not spelling) rather than to demonstrate dyslexia:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=222459](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=222459)

<comment><USER28> You didn't have trouble reading it, because the author deliberately kept the first and last letters the same, and referred to Typoglycemia, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typoglycemia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typoglycemia), which has shown that you can (often, not always) mix up the internal letters and the works are still very legible.

In doing this, I think the creator was specifically trying to make a Typoglycemia simulator, not a dyslexia simulator, since the original quote said nothing about the first and last letters remaining the same.

<comment><AUTHOR> You can't really simulate Typoglycemia, since it isn't a condution, but a phenomenon.

But yeah. I wanted the effect to be somewhat distracting while still readable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> This is certainly a cool effect, but as someone with dyslexia I've never experienced text like this.

</comment><comment><USER30> If you are wondering about the JS code:

[https://gist.github.com/alexcasalboni/ba7c99fb3484579c0dad](https://gist.github.com/alexcasalboni/ba7c99fb3484579c0dad)

</comment><comment><USER31> Maybe this is important, not because it an accurate representation of dyslexia, but because it can simulate the effect of it. I could read everything pretty quickly and accurately except for some of the longest words, but I got this feeling of my brain's CPU overheating. At the end of the article I was frustrated and tired. I wanted to stop reading. This is coming from someone who probably reads tens of thousands (or more) of words per day of articles, emails, comments, and source code.

</comment><comment><USER32> It would be great to be able to dyslexiafy any page on the internet (both with and without animation) then a lot of folks could use it to explain the various versions/intensities of the condition.

For example, therapists could use the tool to help parents understand what their kids are going through.

Edit: Of course, this assumes that this is a useful tool to really help people understand dyslexia, which I am not able to judge.

</comment><comment><USER33> I wonder how something like [http://spritzinc.com](http://spritzinc.com) would work for a dyslexic person ?

It basically gives you a single word at a time to read, would that make it easier for a dyslexic person to read bigger text if it was split into smaller one word chunks ?

<comment><USER34> Good question, makes me curious as well!

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Can you understand this? Why do we complain about spelling?

Eye have a spelling chequer, It came with my Pea Sea. It plane lee marks four my revue Miss Steaks I can knot sea.

Eye strike the quays and type a whirred And weight four it two say Weather eye am write oar wrong It tells me straight a weigh.

Eye ran this poem threw it, Your shore real glad two no. Its vary polished in its weigh. My chequer tolled me sew.

A chequer is a bless thing, It freeze yew lodes of thyme. It helps me right all stiles of righting, And aides me when eye rime.

Each frays come posed up on my screen Eye trussed too bee a joule. The chequer pours o'er every word Two cheque sum spelling rule.

</comment><comment><USER35> The demo is enlightening, but the text is not telling to more important thing about dyslexia: The main problem is not the difficult to read (that is an issue of course) but the social implications for the people with this, when parents, teachers and pairs believes the kid can't read because is dumb or lazy. Self esteem goes to the floor and also impact in performance even in thing not related with reading. So awareness that this is a real issue (and not that is lazy) and that the kid has to make a lot of effort to catch up is very important to help them have a better future.

</comment><comment><USER36> Some quick thoughts on the code: [http://pastebin.com/hYiB01RH](http://pastebin.com/hYiB01RH)

First, the isLetter function is both wrong and unused.

Second, messUpMessyPart is suboptimal. Rather than using a while loop to generate random numbers until a < b, why not do something like `var nums = [rand, rand].sort(); a = nums[0]; b = nums[1]`. There's still the case where a=b, but maybe you just run the function 2/10 times instead of 1/10 to compensate for that case.

</comment><comment><USER37> This may help some people who deal with this problem.

[http://www.anlp.org/how-could-nlp-help- me.php?cscid=11](http://www.anlp.org/how-could-nlp-help-me.php?cscid=11)

[http://www.anlp.org/files/dyslexia- strategies_33_153.pdf](http://www.anlp.org/files/dyslexia- strategies_33_153.pdf)

for those who are having extreme difficulty, you may want to let your computer read that to you.

best of luck to all, I hope this makes a difference for someone.

</comment><comment><USER38> If anyone would like to try this on more websites, I wrapped it in a quick Eager app: [http://preview.eager.io/dyslexia/](http://preview.eager.io/dyslexia/)

I also modified the source to not use jQuery in the process: [https://github.com/zackbloom/dyslexia/blob/master/script.js](https://github.com/zackbloom/dyslexia/blob/master/script.js)

</comment><comment><USER39> What tools do people use to get around dyslexia? I recently realised that most auto-correct and spelling correction tools breakdown for dyslexic people. The challenge for them is that they know how a word sounds but takes more time than usual to recollect the spelling. The recommendations suggested by standard spell checkers are way off the mark in those cases. Any recommendations would be appreciated.

<comment><USER24> Check out [http://www.atdyslexia.com/web-based- tools/](http://www.atdyslexia.com/web-based-tools/) or Talk Typer (Chrome extension)

<comment><USER39> Thanks for the link! Seems like a good place to start.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I'm guessing this is supposed to do something? Expecting the letters to jumble themselves or similar.

Doesn't work for me on either Firefox or Chrome desktop.

<comment><AUTHOR> Any error messages in your console?

<comment><USER41> It could be a HTTPS error - jquery is loaded over HTTP, so blocked on the secure page.

Replacing

        <script type="text/javascript" src="http://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/jquery/2.0.3/jquery.min.js"></script>

with

        <script type="text/javascript" src="//cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/jquery/2.0.3/jquery.min.js"></script>

should enable HTTPS as required AFAIK

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. Fixed.

<comment><USER41> The Disqus.com comments are still blocked on the secure version of the page (disqus.com/embed.js is loaded via HTTP only), but the main functionality works fine now with HTTPS Everywhere enabled.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> The attempt at simulation of dyslexia is thumped by the fact that the brain can read fairly fluently when the letters are mixed up. [http://www.mrc- cbu.cam.ac.uk/people/matt.davis/cmabridge/](http://www.mrc- cbu.cam.ac.uk/people/matt.davis/cmabridge/)

Still, this is a cool and share-worthy article imo :)

</comment><comment><USER43> I have a mild suspicion that my 4 year old niece may be dyslexic. She can read and write all the letters and their sounds, but she can't seem to tie the sounds into syllables, not even the simplest ones. She is not being pressured into reading, she just liked it up to this point. Is there any tell-tale sign I should be aware of ?

<comment><USER44> While I don't know anything scientifically established about childhood development, from my extensive and recent exposure to 4 year olds this sounds 100% normal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Wow, could you use this plugin to effectively DRM a document?

This may be a stupid question...

Assume you wanted to ensure non plagerism, just use this this to make it such that each visitor is given a random version of the document which the human mind can read but will be tough as hell to copy/paste phrases or paragraphs?

<comment><AUTHOR> > ensure non plagerism

That would be interesting. You could fairly easily write an automatic spell corrector though. Just replace each word with the most likely anagram as scored by a Markov chain.

I imagine you could do random word substitution with synonyms. By this "watermark" you could identify the source of a leaked document.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Somehow i just don't get why this is so popular? Someone care to elaborate on what i may have missed? As far as i understand, it doesn't even simulate the real life condition very well, as some dyslexia sufferers here have pointed out.

</comment><comment><USER47> Pretty interesting stuff.

What was strange for me is that I had no problem reading 90% of that at the same pace as I usually read except for word I have never seen before.

I tend to speed read contextually skipping over words entirely. Maybe a bad thing now that i think of it...

<comment><USER20> That's interesting. I once ask a friend who speed reads to read his book to me. He said no because if he did he wouldn't be able to understand it himself. He said he read in ideas or pictures. He explained speed reading was like watching a movie. If he would have to explain what he was seeing or read every word and that was more work then he could do and follow along.

It was at this point I understood how different people read differently.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Reminds me of a thing I made. Requires a mouse. [http://afandian.com/moreover/alide-in- wonnerlanc/](http://afandian.com/moreover/alide-in-wonnerlanc/)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> For extra fun, try looking at the JS source in Chrome devtools.

<comment><USER41> Not sure why, but that 'bothered' me way more than the original article. I could read the text of the Wikipedia article without too much of an issue, but as soon as I saw the code all I could think was "This is wrong, and oddly unsettling".

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> I went to this site with NoScript on, and it took me 5 minutes and a trip back to these comments to figure out that something was supposed to be happening.

Is there a name for that?

</comment><comment><USER50> Funny thing is that the text is still very readable (slower, but still readable) to me. I think it should be much worse for people who have the real problems...

</comment><comment><USER51> "Frok it on Ghitub"

</comment><comment><USER52> I think it would be possible to train a model (and present it as an app for people with Dyslexia) that cancels out the jumping letters. It is kind of like superimposing two waves which has a coherent text, that most of us see, as the product.

<comment><USER53> You're making a lot of absurd assumptions here. You're assuming that this demo is a completely literal representation of what dyslexics experience, which is unlikely, and you're assuming that there is some predictable pattern to the shuffling, which there isn't (check the source, it's just randomly choosing words and then randomly shuffling their internal letters).

<comment><USER52> It is a thought and has nothing to do with how this particular entity has been implemented. What I got from the post was that dyslexic people see words/letters differently than us. And _maybe_ there is a way to balance that out with deterministic _enforced_ shuffling (edit: don't take _shuffling_ literally). That is why used the word "train". I don't think anyone except a person with dyslexia knows what the "patterns" are, if any. The patterns could be different for every person too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Great thing about poor vision is I can read this without problem

</comment><comment><USER55> I wonder if people with dyslexia can read things rendered with the dyslexia app like normal people can read normal text. That would be a trip!

<comment><USER20> For me it depends on how it is done. If the application just displaces the same letters. No, it's still hard to read. If the app substitues letters that look alike (dpqb) then I can read it just fine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> funny thing, if you will look in the page source, he is changing the google analytics script as well

</comment><comment><USER57> I don't know about other dyslexics but this not what it feels like to me. For me the words don't move they're just different. The letters are often swapped, I could stare at a word for a long time because I can't quite tell what it is.

I even looked at the title of this and thought it was spelled right but then something inside my head said "look again". When I went to the site the problem is the words move rapidly and the changes are too obvious. The challenge with my dyslexia is that the words have changed before I see them in subtle ways that trip you up when you start reading.

A couple of things I've noticed:

* Handwriting is ok for me if it's printed but cursive is almost impossible for me to read.

* Using light fonts on a dark background really helps a lot, when I switched my ipad kindle to black background and white font my reading speed went up almost 20x. It felt like I was part of the human race finally and understood what people meant by a "quick enjoyable read".

Accidently my work on computers started on old CRT terminals where the fonts where light and the background was dark. Green screens and Orange screens were awesome I was most productive on them. Over time I got sucked into the windows white background and found myself lost again. I literally at one point thought I was loosing my ability to code and that my writing and reading was getting worse. At some point I would ssh into boxes and use vi because I felt more productive, over time I realized the reason was the ssh client I was using was like the old CRT terminals and had black background with colored foreground fonts. Once I figured that out I changed everything I can to this format of dark background and never looked back.

I've also noticed as I get tired my dyslexia really kicks in, I start to ask my wife "Is this word spelled right?" and even with spell check I second guess it's suggestions because the words don't "look right". It's strange I can't tell you the letters are swapped or not, I just feel like cognitive dissonance has kicked in.

Dyslexia is hard to explain, if you've ever had that feeling where you were talking along and all of a sudden couldn't remember the name of an old friend or something and your train of thought just collapses on this one issue, maybe even you find yourself embarrassed or a feeling of tunnel vision falls over you. This is exactly how I feel, stupid, what's wrong why can't I read this word, I must be an idiot. I've struggled with this feeling all my life, it permeates my life and I have to battle it almost daily. I know I'm not stupid, but growing up unable to read like my classmates and having teachers tell me I'm an idiot did not help much on this front. I think the hardest thing about dyslexia is that until you know you have it and until others believe it you end living in this horrible self doubting and self deprecating world convinced there is something wrong with you and that you're an idiot. This is the secret pain of dyslexia...

I was told in High School that I could never be a programmer because my short- term memory and dyslexia would make it impossible for me to be successful. I was devastated because I was already coding in BASIC on a TRS-80 Model I and having so much success, for once I had found a thing I could type wrong things into over and over and not be judged. Then when I got it right it would just "work". No judgement, no "SYNTAX ERROR AGAIN YOU IDIOT". For the first time in my life I felt accepted and smart, I could code for days and build amazing things. But, being told I couldn't do it killed me, I spent days in a haze and then one day it hit me. The person who told me that was the idiot, not me, they weren't programming, I was already doing it, and better than anyone at my entire school. So luckily for me I ignored that and went on to enjoy 35 years of being in technology, writing any language I desire and mastering anything I put my mind to.

In the end dyslexia is just a thing, like all of us we are dealt a hand of cards in this life from random genetic expressions to accidents and horrible people who put us down while we are growing up. It's up to us to overcome, to push through and make the best of all the tools we were given in that random lotto and try very hard to learn along the way and hopefully find some love while doing it all.

</comment><comment><USER58> My new salt generator.

</comment><comment><USER59> The disabling aspects of Dyslexia are correctable and can be overcome.

<comment><USER60> Feel like backing that up with some actual information or resources?

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> This is not dyslexia. It is both a curse and a gift.

It is extremely misunderstood. This only makes that point more apparent.

Dylexia is a gift, once you understand how to adapt.

This project is quite stupid.

<comment><USER62> I'd be very interested to hear more about how it is after one has adapted.

<comment><USER63> I for one tend to flip numbers around in my head so I never rely on them. This turns out is a good way to make sure that any mathematical calculations you do are correct as I am always double and triple checking them. Einstein also had it and it might of aided him in the same way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> I wrote a Chrome extension which demonstrates Typoglycemia by scrambling the words on whatever webpage you are on. It's similar to the OP's webpage but does not produce a constantly changing page of words.

You can find it here: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/word- welter/ahmpgo...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/word- welter/ahmpgoebcklpogmobamdjliigbncofep)

</comment><comment><USER65> (First post so apologies if i've not got the rules right). As a dyslexic myself I'd like to know if any other dylexics speed read and if they do, do they do it by default. I hear myself reading and thus the speed is the speed of someone talking. I found [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11162927](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11162927) interesting and wondered about the crossover with dyslexia. Personally I suspect there are a few different flavours of dyslexia - I don't have words move about for me. What I would love to see is a spellchecker done correctly - remembering arbitrary spellings is hard because they are arbitrary. I want a spell checker that tells me the word is wrong and shows me which letters I should be adding / subtracting to get the right spelling. Autocorrect just holds me back from being a better speller. I'm also convinced I'm a much better developer for having dyslexia - far more leftfield than most.</comment>


Can Regional Governance Solve the Bay's Housing Crisis? We're About to Find Out - <AUTHOR> https://www.thebaycitybeacon.com/politics/can-regional-governance-solve-the-bay-s-housing-crisis-we/article_ef5119a0-03f8-11e9-a935-eb64e0d733aa.html <comment><USER2> A monument on how the housing crisis is the combination of both incompetence and malice. Price controls, discretionary zoning and control of production with affordable housing.

California deserves all its woes and tech should just leave california to stop giving away the value they create as an industry to landlords and city officials. California only has misery in its future.

<comment><USER3> It will never happen because the people that control the money have enough it to afford the good parts of the state. California and even San Francisco can be very beautiful in very specific areas.

I live in SOMA, it's dirty to say the least. Go into the Mission, there are places that somehow manage to be worse. Then there is the Tenderloin, I do Meals On Wheels and have delivered food to people in a SRO, I suggest you look up what that is to understand why the Tenderloin is as bad as it is.

The NW corner of Sf may as well be a different city.

<comment><USER2> Money cannot shield you from the disgraces of a decaying economy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> As someone from the Bay Are who has moved to NYC, I hope so! It's high dimensional negotiaton so fingers crossed.

Also, really appreciate the depth of the coverage in this one.

<comment><USER5> All talk no action.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The money is there - $250 million per year for social workers alone in SF and increasing ...

The will to build a single unit of housing for homeless people isn't though.</comment>


Ask HN: Please review my new project, Film vs Film - <AUTHOR> http://filmvsfilm.com/

<comment><USER2> I've set up a similar voting site with moderate success (about 3.5 million page views in a bit over a year):

<http://www.bestsporecreature.com/creatures>

A couple of points:

\- The biggest hurdle is that you need to have watched both movies to really decide between them - with a simple image voting site, the judgement can be instant. Movie buffs will likely enjoy it, more casual movie watchers like myself probably won't get far.

\- related to the above: it needs to be easier/more obvious how to skip a pair.

\- to really make it sticky, you should offer something to the hardcore set. In a kittenwars, that's pretty obvious - people can upload pictures of their cats, and keep coming back to see how they do. It doesn't translate very well to movies, because people don't really add "their" movies - and there's even less emotional attachment to a "pairing" of movies. It's mildly interesting, but not something you want to check obsessively throughout the day. You need a way for people to keep score and know when they're "winning".

Which movie is better IS an interesting argument - but the point is often to show off one's knowledge of movies, which this site doesn't really let you do.

How about this: when you create a fight, you can state which movie you think is better, or estimate a percentage win for each movie. Then, your "score" is how many people agree with you through the blind voting on the home page. The more matchups you add, and the closer your initial guess, the better your "score". Add a leaders list, and you're getting places now.

</comment><comment><USER3> Thanks for not calling it startup. No offence to anyone, but I genuinely like it when people call their projects as projects.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> This is an idea I've been working on for the last month or so. I wanted to make a fun and addictive site with a low barrier to participation. After iterating through a few prototypes with friends, I opened the site to the public last week.

Some data so far: The average visitor generates over 50 page views, and stays for longer than 5 minutes. There's significant click-through to Amazon, which is how the site generates revenue. People seem to enjoy the site, but only a few seem to be sharing it with their friends.

I have a Facebook Platform app in the works, which I hope will help to increase the site's virality. In the mean time, I'd be grateful for any feedback you could provide.

<comment><USER4> Average of 50 page views is great, but whats the % of returning visitors? I think u've gota find/create a reason for users to return. Neat idea nonetheless.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I found myself voting for movies I wasn't familiar with. The link to skip isn't strong enough.

</comment><comment><USER6> I agree with others that there should be some kind of scoring. It's surprising how addicted people get to trying to improve their score, especially if there is some leaderboard present. Just give people points for the activities you hope they will do.

You could give points for correct guesses (maybe with time limit) and give even more points for creating their own fights, possibly depending on how "good" the combination of movies is (not sure how to determine that).

When using this site, it beat my expectations in that I actually found some movies I intend to watch after using it. Stuff I had forgotten exists, like I had watched Evil Dead 3 but skipped 1 and 2. Thanks for reminding.

</comment><comment><USER7> Got me hooked. I just kept clicking until I realized... hey what are you doing? Stop clicking! So that part is done.

But then what happens?

<comment><AUTHOR> In theory, you're supposed to think "hey, I've got a great idea for a match- up" and then head over here:

<http://filmvsfilm.com/make>

In practice, most people don't seem to discover that part of the site, or aren't interested.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, building a population of contributors is hard, as I'm discovering ( <http://payload42.com> ). There might be some decent suggestions at <http://meta.stackexchange.com> where folks are trying to figure out better ways to seed Q&A sites.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Addictive, very low barrier to entry - but where's the stickiness ? Why would i go back and more importantly what is there to make me remember my fights of which film won or lost ?

</comment><comment><USER10> This webpage has a redirect loop.

The webpage at <http://filmvsfilm.com/> has resulted in too many redirects. Clearing your cookies for this site or allowing third-party cookies may fix the problem. If not, it is possibly a server configuration issue and not a problem with your computer.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, this should be fixed now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> yet another kitten war? <http://kittenwar.com/>

<comment><USER12> I thought puppy war (<http://www.puppywars.com/>) was another kitten war?

Disclousure: I am not sure which one of these actually came out first and I don't care to look.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I can dig it. The functionality is right there as soon as you arrive. Fun to compare movies I'm familiar with, but also kinda cool to see juxtapositions of movies I have seen with ones I haven't.

Suggestions? I dunno, maybe a big fat arrow to skip to the next pair instead of the text "skip it". For some reason it took me a little longer than it should have to locate that element.

</comment><comment><USER13> Good name! We could never come up with a descriptive title for this at <http://www.greatmovieexperiment.com/> The name seems so obvious now. Our goal was to create a list of the top films by showing all the pairings of films randomly. I presume a "top fights" page on yours will be forthcoming?

</comment><comment><USER14> Have you considered moving the "Pick one!" column to the middle? It might be more obvious there.

Why is the about-page styled differently from the rest of the site? It also has a stray </a>.

More (minor) html errors: <http://vldtr.com/?key=filmvsfilm.com>

<comment><AUTHOR> I did try putting the column in the middle, but I didn't like the result.

The about page is borrowed from another project of mine, I didn't want too spend much time on it, it's more of a placeholder than anything.

Fixed those validation errors, thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> More details from the movies - tag lines, famous scenes, remind me of the movie - the box isn't enough.

<comment><USER16> that's useful. I'm brazilian, i've seen most of those movies in my childhood, with the title translated (i.e. f*!&$d up). the DVD cover might not give much detail to figure out the movie in some rare cases.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> why don't you structure the whole thing like a league? films that 'win' a match, get paired to each other and so on until you find the 'greatest film', Granted, many will disagree, but it should make the project a bit more substantial and may make people come back.

<comment><USER18> Yup, provide a time-limited contest : "December 1st (or whaterver), come back to see the winner!".

This could create quite a viral loop.

Also, try to provide a sense of tribe : make people sense they belong as fans of a certain movies. This will greatly increase their participation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Nice, but to keep me interested for longer, I think it would have to have a bit more to it.

</comment><comment><USER20> Sorry, this isn't really good feedback, but I think others have covered most of the points. I loved some of the match ups, like the one between The Professional and The Littlest Mermaid. I couldn't decide.

</comment><comment><USER21> There's something I don't understand : why is everything based on opposition ? I mean, why not create a connection website ? What connects "breathless" ("à bout de souffle") to "la scala" ?

</comment><comment><USER22> there were some films too close to call but I wanted to see the result.. eg "lost in translation" vs "adaptation"

also would be good to have a filter eg "only show most controversial" or "only show scifi"</comment>


What's Going Down at the Tiobe Index? Swift, Surprisingly - <AUTHOR> https://blog.metaobject.com/2019/04/what-going-down-at-tiobe-index-swift.html <comment><USER2> The Tiobe index is not a reliable indicator of anything; their methodology is extremely noisy. A fractional percentage drop is meaningless.

<comment><USER3> The clearest example to me that Tiobe does not reflect reality is the Javascript chart:

[https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/javascript/](https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe- index/javascript/)

Javascript in 2019 only has 0.5% more market share than in 2004?

2019 has basically every new UI (and many rewrites of old ones) being built in Javascript, 2004 it was being used for the occasional drop down menu.

(Even if you include Typescript, the only compile-to-JS language in the top 50, it still only gets to 2.7% today compared to 2% in 2004).

See also C unassailably at number 2. I think we can all agree that in 2019, there is more active development in Javascript, than C - Likely it's benefiting from their methodology giving it credit for C++ and C#, so at least we can theorise about that one, but I really have no idea for Javascript.

<comment><USER4> If I want to find the MDN page for destructuring assignment in JavaScript I know I don't need to add JavaScript or MDN, I can just search for "Array Destructuring", and the top half dozen results are all JavaScript.

<comment><USER5> And if _I_ want to search for say which of call/apply takes an array, or even confirm what version of php a new flag is introduced, I'm not searching for "$language programming $feature".

I'm using DDG bangs to reduce the noise from the start and take me straight to a site specific result : `!mdn function apply` or eg `!php preg_split`.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm an extreme outlier, but I'm about to start an Objective-C codebase (a 2D renderer on top of Metal), because I suspect interop with Rust will be a lot easier. In particular, it looks like you can just build .m files from a build.rs, and I'm pretty sure that's not true with Swift. It's also possible to invoke Obj-C from Rust using the dynamic features, but I think that's both code bloat and a runtime cost. [I'm interested in exploring these issues further, but it's probably outside the scope of this HN thread, get in touch if you want to discuss.]

Example build.rs: [https://github.com/emoon/rust_minifb/blob/master/build.rs](https://github.com/emoon/rust_minifb/blob/master/build.rs)

<comment><USER7> If you want to call rust from Swift, it should be easy. I work with C libraries and it easy to interface with module maps. However, with objective C the interoperability is trivial. As long as you pay attention to retain cycles, you can hold reference and call objc methods directly. That said, please make sure your framework can be imported into Swift properly. As most of the users will be using Swift.

<comment><USER6> Yes, I've seen examples of calling Rust from Swift, and I do plan to support that. This particular thing is about calling macOS platform functions from Rust code. Projects either call Objective-C API's from native Rust code using the dynamic invocation mechanism (which I think is slow and code-bloaty but want to measure more carefully), or they use the "cc" crate to include Objective-C code (and then generally use C ABI calls from Rust code into that). I've never seen Rust code that compiles Swift from a "cargo build" but of course would love to be proven wrong.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't care about the random TIOBE fluctuations. But I really don't get the love for Swift.

\- Optional is a nuisance and I don't think it is highly effective at preventing the dereference of a nil pointer _in practice_. People are going to fiddle with ? and ! until their code works, and the protection that Optional provides then disappears.

\- "let" is a mess. In one context it means unwrapping an Optional. In another, it doesn't. If you use it in an expression, it interferes with the usual refactorings that people apply to expressions.

\- There is so much fussy detail around preserving the syntax of object.field = expression. didSet, willSet, getters, setters, oldValue, newValue. WHY IS THIS SYNTAX SO FRIGGIN' IMPORTANT? One of the justified criticisms of C++ (IMHO) is that operator overloading means that all sorts of functions can be running under innocent-looking code. I would much rather have = mean assignment, and use function call notation when I really want functions to run.

\- Reference counting is a bad compromise between the unpredictability of GC, and the burden of explicit memory management. It's mostly unobtrusive, but I've seen examples of code that require careful and non-obvious use of weak to avoid memory leaks, (sorry, I don't have the reference handy).

It sure beats Objective-C, and it does have some nice modern features, but I think they made some unfortunate design choices.

<comment><USER9> > \- Reference counting is a bad compromise between the unpredictability of > GC, and the burden of explicit memory management. It's mostly unobtrusive, > but I've seen examples of code that require careful and non-obvious use of > weak to avoid memory leaks, (sorry, I don't have the reference handy).

This is such a bizarre statement to me. I have to wonder if the commenter has ever dealt with production systems or code that uses GC? Because with years of writing and tuning Java servers, I've long since come to the conclusion that GC is largely a false economy.

You still have to deal with memory leaks but the cause this time is objects maintaining references they don't need. Sure GCs become cleverer at detecting unused forests of objects and so on but this largely makes another problem worse: so-called stop-the-world pauses for a full GC. It's still an issue you have to deal with on Java, Go and probably every GC language.

This isn't to say that ref-counting is a panacea (what is?). Particularly on servers the critical region for updating the ref-count itself can become hot and a bottleneck.

But this isn't really a problem on mobile app code. I've long said that iOS's uses of ref-counting (ARC since 5.0+) is a strategic and competitive advantage to Android's Dalvik/Java GC.

Google's Plan9 2.0 (ie Fuchsia) makes me sad (for many reasons). Just one is that they've embraced Dart/Flutter at the application level (which isn't required as anyone who works on it will tell you, yada yada yada) but Dart is such a strange choice because it still relies on GC. What's the point?

Oh and just to be pedantic, you list ref-counting as a negative of Swift compared to Objective-C. ARC is orthogonal to that. Like I said, ARC came about in iOS 5.0.

<comment><USER10> IDK about Java, but the GC characteristics of Go seem pretty ideal for UI code. I think they're at sub-1ms pauses on multi-GB heaps now. So even if you want to run at 100 fps it shouldn't be a big obstacle to making frame rate. Of course there's a throughput trade off, but same thing with reference counting.

Although I guess it doesn't matter much since the library ecosystem isn't there. I think it would have been an interesting choice for Flutter instead of Dart though.

For just memory management, I don't see the downside of GC (vs reference counting) if the latency is good enough. Sure you can still leak memory by maintaining references but at least it deals with cycles (and it's one less thing that any dependencies can screw up).

If GC latency is OK, the only remaining advantage of reference counting I can think of is the deterministic destruction of non-memory resources like file handles etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Personal opinion: if the index is based on search, then if one language has better documentation, better ide support, less surprises, then the search count will be less and probably has a lower ranking in Tiobe.

And also, since swift's adoption domain mainly in ios development, it heavily affected by the iOS ecosystem.

My take on why objective c is higher ranked, not because it is better, but it has tons of gotchas, that people have to do heavy search to get things done.

<comment><USER12> Does Swift have "better documentation"? Because I've always found Apple's developer documentation a bit lacking.

<comment><USER13> It might be lacking, but there is definitely a culture within iOS of using the Apple docs for things, Apple tooling, Apple development practices, etc. It's a much more closed ecosystem in many ways than most of the other ecosystems I've been exposed to (JS, Python, Ruby, even .NET in some ways).

Because of this, I wouldn't at all be surprised if searches aren't common because Apple provides documentation, regardless of its quality.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Swift is a good but not great language considering when it came out.

One good thing about it is that it lets iOS apps run as well as Java/Kotlin apps in ~60% the memory. I'm sure the layers of legacy Android APIs also contribute to this.

The other good thing is that it's close enough to Kotlin to switch between iOS/Android without as much friction.

<comment><USER15> I code for iOS (in ObjC) and Android (in Java) and honestly the language differences are trivial to me. The much harder parts to deal with are the APIs and the IDE differences. (In particular, I really loathe gradle and Android Studio.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> have used swift since version 2.x to create several mobile apps so i consider myself proficient, for the record, i have also used php, nodejs, c/c++, java, ruby, python, and golang quite extensively. i consider myself a full stack developer.

regarding swift, i am not a fan of the language at all, i use it more out of necessity, when i started to write ios apps, swift was available and i had already gotten used to not having to deal with memory management and such so chose the language, i also thought objc as a language for ios apps was a bit too verbose after looking at some tutorials, i had been used to using interpreted languages and syntactically concise languages like golang so thought i'd give swift a try.

somehow, over the years, i've managed to write a few apps with swift, so it does the job, the 2 things i dislike the most is the "as/as?/as!" statement, e.g. when i have a dictionary like object [String: Any] and having to "as" that is annoying to me, and you can't cast which to me is more direct, you have to first "as? Int" and then de-convert the optional with an !

The second thing i really hate about the syntax is the whole thing with "let" constants, i'm fine having to check for NULL first, but to do if let apples = fruits["apples"] as? String {...}, i guess this is kind of related to the first issue.

my swift code is such a spaghetti mess of these statements, i imagine a lot of it has to do with me, but this doesn't seem to be a problem with other languages. it could also be that i'm just trying to plow through the code so that i can get functionality working asap.

<comment><USER17> If you're doing so much casting you're doing something wrong. Swift's power comes from the type system, which alleviates the need for all casting in general. Instead of using a [String: Any] dictionary which bears no meaning at all, consider converting it to a struct with accessors of the right types. If you work with the type system, Swift will be a joy to use, because that's where it shines.

<comment><USER18> I'd agree with this completely. A lot of the people I see having issues with it are trying to write it like python or something. For this style of coding objective-c is a much better choice.

<comment><USER16> also not sure why you were downvoted, i voted you back up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I don't see Swift used for anything outside of iOS development. I don't really think it has enough to offer over more neutral languages like Python or TypeScript to make it worth the time of learning a new language. It's in a position similar to C# in my opinion.

<comment><USER20> Maybe over TypeScript but I would love it if Swift displaced Python. Python is ridiculously popular for some good reasons (the clarity of code that tends to come out of it) but a whole lot of bad ones - complete lack of an effective type system, no usable multithreading etc let novice developers write bad code lazily without really feeling bad and it still passes as good code ... it's effectively the PHP of this decade.

<comment><USER21> This simply won't happen till Swift can interop with C, C++ and possibly even ASM, fluently.

Even then, you need structure, data types, and actual foresight while writing code, which leaves out all the less CS/SE trained peeps, such as scientists.

And Swift is never going to be better as a scripting language. Lua, Python, Bash etc all have a few things in common, and Swift would stand out like a sore thumb in that company.

<comment><USER20> Yes, I agree completely. Indeed, I would say the same thing in reverse if Swift was taking over the world of scripting (a bit like how people propose Kotlin and Scala as scripting languages ...). Using those languages for interactive analysis & high level scripting is as bad an idea as using Python for building a complex application with large numbers of rich data structures.

<comment><USER21> > using Python for building a complex application with large numbers of rich > data structures.

Eh, you don't need to though. Python can be the glue for your tools, if you will. Writing the meaty parts can be done in C/++, while you glue everything together in Python, giving you the best of both performance and ease of writing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Oh, and it appears that Smalltalk has at least re-entered the top 50 after a 5 year absence:

[https://medium.com/@richardeng/smalltalk-and- tiobe-5409afb19...](https://medium.com/@richardeng/smalltalk-and- tiobe-5409afb19ef3)

<comment><USER22> This took me down a rabbit hole. I wonder if there are any legit reasons to use Smalltalk (Pharo) these days?

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> My main issue with Swift, at least initially, was how much of a moving target it was/(is?). It's been in public use for under five years and it's already on it's 5th major version. I'd learn it to a certain degree, start working on something else, then come back and find that a lot had changed while I wasn't paying attention. That said, the difficulty in iOS development stems from getting a good understanding of the core libraries, and thats much easier to do in Swift than in Objective-C (unless you're already familiar with that language or coming from something like Smalltalk).

<comment><USER24> Swift 3 was the last version that had dramatic changes. The first two years it was pretty upfront about being a work-in-progress that wasn't for people who wanted something stable, and the last two years it's been pretty stable with only very minor incremental changes.

<comment><USER17> > The first two years it was pretty upfront about being a work-in-progress > that wasn't for people who wanted something stable

I've been very much on the Swift train in its first 2 years, but I've never heard of anything like that. Do you have a source?

<comment><USER18> [https://swift.org/blog/abi-stability-and-more/](https://swift.org/blog/abi- stability-and-more/)

Almost every release has been pushing towards this. That's not to say that that swift has been "unstable" as it was pretty solid from the beginning but they did make it pretty clear that you would need to accept a lot of changes in the early days.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The tiobe index always seems to be way out of line with the other indices out there. Nobody but tiobe ranks VB.net above c#. Also the other day I read that Lazarus isn't taken into account in terms of assessing the popularity of object Pascal, because Lazarus is an IDE, not a language. Tiobe also seen to be constantly tweaking the methodology such that if you look back at historical rankings they can be totally different to the rankings for the same period that were reported historically. Which is verging on the dishonest. It would be like a tipster going back and revising his tips after the fact.

<comment><USER26> Microsoft own "statistics" claim million of C# devs, 100ks of VB.NET devs and 10ks of F# devs.

Tiobe is strange. Either they blend all Basic together (legacy code bases) or something more stupid happens :)

<comment><USER27> Its not strange. Just a result of bad input.

Search for:

+"C# programming" \- 2 340 000 results <\- USED

+"Visual Basic .NET programming" \- 17 000 000 results <\- USED

+"C# .NET programming" \- 26 600 000 results.

<comment><USER26> Okay. So it is "more stupid happens" :).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Tiobe compares search engine queries and lists the most popular languages mentioned in its list. So as an example PHP will naturally end up high on the list and Closure will end up low. Because PHP has lots of irregularities to check, and Closure doesn't. So it might be Swift is simply a better language than ObjectiveC?

</comment><comment><USER29> My first thought once I saw this was "flutter". It's really getting a lot of market share in mobile dev and all you need to write is Dart, for better or worse. Also, whenever you need to do iOS specific duct-tape-plumbing, it seems that Obj-C is still more capable than Swift because of the accumulated legacy.

However, take it as an educated guess rather than a fact since I have never been a mobile dev apart from hobby apps.

EDIT: typos.

<comment><USER30> I've recently been stuck with a react native project and I was surprised to learn that objective-c is still the language of choice for interop.

<comment><USER31> Well until the next version of Swift it'll add 10mb of runtime to your app, not worth it for 100 lines of code

<comment><USER32> The _current_ version of Swift, actually. Swift 5 has already been released.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I really wish we could build iOS/Cocoa apps in Rust. Like Swift, we could use reference counting instead of GC, but Rust has a much nicer type system.

<comment><USER34> Swift's type system was designed to make developers happy, Rust's to make the borrow checker happy.

As it turns out, some people think like a borrow checker and don't have any issue with Rust's choice. But most don't and we should not make them miserable.

<comment><USER33> Well, really it was designed for ObjC interop. Hence the limits on (e.g.) generic protocols.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Not much movement for Swift either direction in the job postings shared in the monthly whoishiring thread, but still consistently beating Objective-C

[https://www.hntrends.com/2019/mar-postgresql-vs-mysql-no- lon...](https://www.hntrends.com/2019/mar-postgresql-vs-mysql-no-longer- close.html?compare=Swift&compare=Objective-C)

</comment><comment><USER36> To the extent that this is even meaningful I suspect it reflects a disenchantment with native apps in general. The app goldrush is long since over and getting an app on a user's home screen now is extremely expensive and difficult.

That said I'll take Swift over Objective C any day.

</comment><comment><USER37> I'd be curious to hear from iOS devs what they think is going on here. Did anyone try moving to Swift and what was the specific reason for going back to Obj-C?

<comment><USER38> I would suspect it's because even many of the core libraries are still written in Obj-C. Swift is neat and I really like it, but the ecosystem is such that even when using it on a new project you end up writing ~25% of your project in Obj-C.

<comment><USER39> Depends on the nature of your project but I can count the number of Obj-C libraries I'd be likely to use in my projects on one hand, and they all play secondary roles (e.g. analytics). For almost anything else Foundation/UIKit and third party Swift libraries would be used.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Is there any good reason why Apple couldn't just let us code apps directly in JS/React and not have to go through React Native with its overhead? React surely isn't perfect, but it's likely the best way to create large scale UIs. Far better than Swift.

<comment><USER41> Neither React nor Swift can create UIs alone.

<comment><USER32> …they can?

<comment><USER41> React is a set of JS APIs and tools that live on top of a an underlying model (the browser DOM, litho, etc.) Swift is a programming language. The comparison doesn't really make any sense.

<comment><USER32> Well, yes, but this is a pedantic comment in relation to the post you were replying to.

<comment><USER41> It wasn't meant to be. OP expressed a desire to "code apps directly in React" and avoid "React Native with its overhead." But that's meaningless: the React design is a layer on top of an underlying model, and that layering will always impose some overhead.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Not sure I believe much in what Tiobe has to say about programming languages but I would happier if Objective C was dead forking last.</comment>


The many Shapley values for model explanation - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.08474 <comment><USER2> > This is the crux of the matter: In taking the model seriously (even > "literally"), BS evaluates it on points in feature space that may never > occur in practice, and may not even be realizable.

Is it April 1?</comment>


How to find low buy-in mutual funds, i.e. investing for poor students - <AUTHOR> http://www.frugallawstudent.com/2007/10/01/reader-question-how-to-pick-an-index-fund-with-a-low-initial-investment/

<comment><USER2> Why not just purchase your own portfolio of stocks? The min. buy-in for most online brokers is approx. $1,000.

I would recommend a solid foundation of known companies - Google, Apple, etc. Then take a gamble on some companies that have promising technology. People in their 20's and 30's will have more than even though time to recoup potential loses. Also invest in what you know!</comment>


NSA encryption plan for 'internet of things' rejected by ISO - <AUTHOR> https://www.wikitribune.com/story/2018/04/20/business/exclusive-nsa-encryption-plan-for-internet-of-things-rejected-by-international-body/67004/ <comment><USER2> Key point:

>According to WikiTribune's source, experts in the delegations have clashed over recent weeks and the NSA has not provided the technical detail on the algorithms that is usual for these processes. The U.S. delegation's refusal to provide a "convincing design rationale is a main concern for many countries," the source said.

So it's not just "We don't trust anything the NSA puts out." It's "The NSA is refusing to explain their algorithms in lieu of saying 'Trust us,' and we don't."

<comment><USER3> It's worth bearing in mind that the documentation issues here are basically process concerns more than they are substantive concerns. Both Simon and Speck are straightforward designs. Cryptographers are capable of evaluating a deliberately-simple lightweight ARX cipher!

But in real standards competitions, academic cryptographers bundle their designs with rationale essays and point-by-point explanations of how the designer mitigated attacks, like differential and linear trails. Standards groups didn't get that from NSA, and when academic cryptographers poked at the ciphers and asked questions about linear trails, the NSA designers got standoffish.

I think there's a subtext to all of this where the NSA is dismissive of, well, basically all academic cryptanalytic work. The converse of that, of academics and the NSA, didn't (I think?) used to be true, but might gradually be taking this shape, so that the two groups are just mutually dismissive of each other.

So, where in the past the NSA got some deference that enabled them to submit standards proposals that didn't follow process, now the opposite is true, and academic cryptographers expect deference.

It's no tragedy. NSA brought this on themselves, and really, what we're "losing" here is kind of a marginal design anyways, right?

(I write this in the hopes that someone better connected to these issues will correct me on lots of it!)

<comment><USER4> _I think there 's a subtext to all of this where the NSA is dismissive of, well, basically all academic cryptanalytic work. The converse of that, of academics and the NSA, didn't (I think?) used to be true, but might gradually be taking this shape, so that the two groups are just mutually dismissive of each other._

This isn't new. My paper about exploiting shared caches in Intel Hyperthreading as a side channel to steal an RSA key was rejected by the Cryptology ePrint archive "because it wasn't about cryptology", while some people in the computer security community dismissed it as "just a theoretical cryptography thing".

<comment><USER5> Are you claiming to have prior knowledge and academic precedent for Meltdown?

<comment><USER6> A couple of people do, if I recall correctly.

<comment><USER7> I definitely remember rumblings about "Branch prediction runs code outside normal execution? There's _got_ to be a security hole there somewhere." That sentiment was common enough that it's certainly not hard to imagine someone sketching the shape of an actual attack with it before the detailed proof came down the line.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> What's also interesting is how the NSA admonished and personally attacked three cryptographers (including Daniel J. Bernstein aka djb) and called them incompetent:

> _the NSA 's behavior was outrageously adversarial to the process. They > refused to motivate design choices they made such as the choice of matrices > U, V, and W in Simon's key schedule. Instead, they chose to personally > attack some of the experts (including @hashbreaker, Orr Dunkelman and > myself) as incompetent._

> _This is yet another example as to how the NSA 's surveillance program is > bad for global security. If they had been more trustworthy, or at least more > cooperative, different alliances would have probably been formed. But > instead, they chose to try to bully their way into the standards which > almost worked but eventually backfired._

Rest: [https://twitter.com/TomerAshur/status/988696306674630656](https://twitter.com/TomerAshur/status/988696306674630656)

<comment><USER8> I wonder how they personally attacked those experts. Was it public?

<comment><USER3> "Personal attack" is a pretty big stretch here. The NSA is generally dismissive of academic cryptographers, and was dismissive here.

<comment><USER8> Okay that's what the article says but the tweets specifically say that they attacked the credibility of some very well respected security experts

<comment><USER3> If they're talking about what I think they're talking about, they're referring to a technical argument in which pretty much everyone was dismissive. It was still more civil than a typical HN thread, which is in turn more civil than a typical Reddit thread, which in turn is... my point being: outrageous personal attack is a bit of a stretch.

<comment><USER8> I take it you're referencing a discussion that isn't public?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Does anyone who's been following these IoT encryption standards think that new algorithms are truly needed? Considering that even the most trivial embedded devices these days get powerful microcontrollers and megabytes of RAM -- often running a full operating system! -- is there any _perceptible_ gain with one of these unknown lightweight algorithms compared to using a well-known and standard algorithm like AES?

I took a look at the performance tests of AES vs NSA's Simon/Speck done by the CryptoLUX group at the University of Luxembourg[1]. They have so much data comparing different scenarios, processors, and implementation versions that it's difficult to summarize the trade-offs. But my brief look at AES vs Simon/Speck on an 8-bit Atmel AVR processor is that the difference in code size and RAM are in the hundreds of bytes ( _bytes_ , not megabytes) and AES performance might be approximately equal (if AES is implemented with large code size and RAM) or up to 10-15 times slower (if implemented with small code size and RAM).

Seriously, embedded software these days is so bloated (just like in web development), and processors and RAM are so over-provisioned, and encryption is such a minuscule part of the tasks of a system that I wonder if using a standard algorithm like AES would make a perceptible difference to anybody.

[1] [https://www.cryptolux.org/index.php/FELICS_Block_Ciphers_Det...](https://www.cryptolux.org/index.php/FELICS_Block_Ciphers_Detailed_Results#AVR)

<comment><USER8> hundreds of bytes is a lot on AVRs. 1 millisecond is a lot on AVRs.

I'd have to go look at their data myself, because AES is slow even compared to ChaCha20, and these algorithms are significantly more lightweight than that.

<comment><USER10> Why the hell would you use an AVR when there are better resourced and faster ARM cores for the same power drain.

<comment><USER8> Perhaps there are now, but these algorithms were developed several years ago.

Also AVRs are cheap and very easy to use due to their simplicity.

<comment><USER10> STM32 unit cost is lower than most AVRs. And dev is just C as well. Also NXP do Cortex M0 parts for $0.45!

AVRs are pretty hard to use when you hit one of the numerous hardware and peripheral walls. synchronous timers are killing me this week which lead me to switch to a PIC part.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I see the tin foil hats are out in full swing, but the reality is, far from what people assume. From someone who has been following this saga, this is more a fight about how the NSA cooperates (or lack thereof) with ISO and other standards orgs. Most likely due to their own internal self-conflict.

As others have mentioned Simon and Speck very straightforward. There really isn't much room for obscuring anything there. On the other hand, when any group that's a part of a standards org begins to feel so privileged that they can operate under their own rules and without truly cooperating with the others and share information in the way that people are asking for it, it's going to breed further mistrust given the already tense environment due to the history there.

<comment><USER12> I don't know anything of the technical details of Simon and Speck, but distrusting the NSA hardly entails a tinfoil hat.

<comment><USER3> "Distrusting" one of the simplest "mainstream" ARX ciphers entails a little bit of tin foil. That's not really why ISO isn't moving forward with them.

<comment><USER13> That seems to be exactly why ISO isn't moving forward, or at least has been in the past.

[https://www.reuters.com/article/us-cyber-standards- insight/d...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-cyber-standards- insight/distrustful-u-s-allies-force-spy-agency-to-back-down-in-encryption- fight-idUSKCN1BW0GV)

<comment><USER3> Distrust of the NSA has cost it the deference it was given by academic cryptographers to basically ignore the process norms of public crypto standards. That's not the same as saying the academic cryptography community distrusts a simple ARX design.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Better article from April when this story first broke. [https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/04/25/nsa_iot_encryption/](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/04/25/nsa_iot_encryption/)

The standardization of Simon and Speck has been an ongoing fight within ISO/IEC JTC1 SC27 WG2 since 2014 or so, but looks like it's finally game over for now.

<comment><USER3> That's not a great article. In reality, nobody thinks Speck and Simon are backdoored --- they're extremely straightforward block cipher designs with well-understood components. Unless the NSA knows something that breaks all modern block cipher designs --- in which case, why tip your hand? --- there's no place to hide a backdoor in either of these standards.

What happened here seems like a combination of two things: first, a general statement that the community is skeptical of NSA-related standards after the Dual EC fiasco, just on principles, and, second, process concerns about the way NSA interacts with standards bodies --- their work is considered poorly documented and their engagement with the academic research community (for instance, to answer concerns about flaws in their designs) is poor.

<comment><USER15> I don't see why would any Non-American company would accept any of their thoughts/designs after their sneaky backdoor prng.

<comment><USER16> The back door prng wasn't all that sneaky? I would assess "don't look behind the curtain" and "nothing up my sleeves because I'm not wearing sleeves" quite differently.

<comment><USER17> So true. How about the credibility of RSA.

They should be going out of business because all their customers left in droves.

But they didn't and RSA is still an esteemed security company.

What happened when Juniper firewalls were outed by Snowden. Did we ever hear the name of the employee who backdoored their product?

Surely they use revision control and can tell who contributed what. I have to wonder if the NSA mole still works there too. Zero transparency from these "Security Companies".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The NSA trying to propose an encryption plan is like letting wolves decide how to secure sheep. Total conflict of interest, especially after Snowden.

<comment><USER19> But isn't it the same argument that if you wish to secure your system you really need to get a whitehat hacker. NSA looks at herself in the same light as a whitehat.

<comment><USER20> No one else but the NSA sees the NSA as whitehats.

<comment><USER21> Nation-State Adversary is my favorite backronym for NSA.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Here's a weird/fun thought: what if the NSA was trying to lose?

This is the NSA. They're no fools. And they know that no one is going to trust them, especially if they try to bully their way and not reveal details.

What if the next-best competitor for this encryption is _actually_ something they've broken? Could be that they got clever and lucky and figured it out, could be that they planted it with someone secretly working for the NSA. Then it would be in their interest to loudly lose in such a way that the standards committee picks the secretly-broken encryption rather than the one the NSA was pushing.

Fun tinfoil hat ideas, naturally, but it would sure make a better story than the NSA trying to backdoor an encryption standard again.

<comment><USER23> Why would they do that rather than just not submit anything and let the already broken next-best competitor win?

<comment><USER24> Where's the conspiracy theory then?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> When we think about what actually matters when it comes to institutions (public or private) one very important thing is trust.

The NSA has eroded much of the trust it once had. This reduces its effectiveness as an organization and puts all Americans and American companies at increased risk.

Those who committed the crimes revealed by Snowden should be brought to justice, the program dismantled, the hardware auctioned off, and the money returned to taxpayers.

One does not have to be a privacy zealot or an anarchist to believe that the NSA should act within the law.

<comment><USER26> > _puts all Americans and American companies at increased risk._

Both yes and no.

No, because many startups are just looking for the shortest path to market and that means they absolutely will go for US cloud storage and computing if it best serves their initial business plans.

Yes, because there are many ethical businesses (albeit smaller) -- and also in light with the GDPR -- who have a clear business model that doesn't involve selling personally identifiable information. And they now would go an extra mile to ensure they don't use USA-hosted services. I know business owners who did this and I'd do it as well if I was one.

Post Snowden there were a lot of companies offering secure email hosting in Europe. Not sure if that really amounted to a big loss for the USA email hosting market though. Many people are too dependent on Gmail to ever replace it, for example.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> The NSA has lost an insane amount of credibility for acting like a three letter agency instead of a security administration. Turns out its pretty hard to be both.

</comment><comment><USER28> Remember, the S in IoT is for security.

<comment><USER5> IoOPT — the Internet of Other People's Thjngs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> This is the first WikiTribune story I've personally noticed on HN. The story is not as juicy as the headline makes it out to be, but it's good to see WikiTribune as a source of news nonetheless. I'm excited to see more from this site in the future.

<comment><USER30> Do you read WikiTribune? I am always hoping to find better sources of news, but it doesn't appeal to me enough to try.

<comment><USER29> Not at the moment. I'll give it a shot though and see how things go.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Encryption scheme choice doesn't mean much if the devices send all the data to US-controlled "clouds". NSA will be able to read everything anyway.

<comment><USER32> Only if you're operating under the assumption that the NSA has broken all modern encryption algorithms

<comment><USER31> Why do they need to break encryption if they can come to any datacenter and copy data from the server? Or install a backdoor. Or get a subpoena for the data?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> This is what a loss of soft power looks like. The US has burned its reputation and is loosing influence in all areas of the world.

</comment><comment><USER34> I find this kinda sad since both speck and simon are really nice algorithms. The analysis that has been done also shows that seem secure. Moreover, they are simple I have made several implementations, and one that runs simon on a FPGA. It honestly would be hard to sneak a back door in my opinion.

Also keep this in mind the US government also wants to use these algorithms. Why would they use a broken symmetric cipher?

</comment><comment><USER35> Well, I doubt NSA are stupid. The question is more what their plan is to get the standards they want to be accepted. Maybe by exposing themselves and thus creating a better chance for secret allies? We'll need to wait for the next Snowden to find out I guess, if ever.

</comment><comment><USER36> So happy to see a Wiki Tribune link here. I think the project is super cool, I hope it stays around.

</comment><comment><USER37> Some more suspicious elliptic curves no doubt.

</comment><comment><USER38> Don't cryptographers still have concerns about an AES backdoor?

<comment><USER3> No.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Unrelated:

Has anyone ever not clicked on the "this site uses cookies" button on any website since they started being introduced? Does anyone even look at them before clicking them?

<comment><USER40> That button is just a CYA measure. The idea seems to prevent users from claiming they didn't know they were being monitored. It solves nothing and gives users absolutely no control over tracking behavior. I doubt web sites wait for the user's decision to "accept" the use of cookies: since they normally travel via HTTP headers, they would already be in the browser's cookie jar before the page even rendered.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Telnet passwords ought to be good enough, right?

<comment><USER42> No one expects anyone to pass sensitive information in plaintext!

<comment><USER43> Jedi encryption :)

One of the ideas I've tinkered with along the way is hiding encrypted emails in content that's markov generated from unencrypted communications with the same peer. It doesn't have to be perfect, just good enough to not get caught in the slime squad's algorithms.

<comment><USER44> Or you could send encrypted texts with a subject line that tells how many leading zero bits are in your GPG private key. Perhaps start with keysize - 1.

Then for each new message subtract 1 from the number of leading zeros.

Now at some point Eve has to decide for herself when it's no longer worth it to brute force your messages.

Edit: clarification

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Snowden caused this.

That's pretty interesting, one way or the other.

<comment><USER46> Interesting way to put the blame on someone exposing the crimes, instead of those actually doing the crimes.

<comment><USER47> The parent comment can only be read as assigning blame if you think that ISO rejecting the NSA's proposal is a bad thing. I'd say it's a good thing since we know that the NSA's proposals are sometimes backdoored.

<comment><USER48> Irrespective of the proposal being backdoored, it was clear that the NSA refused to follow standard procedure by providing the necessary supporting materials for their proposal, so it's not difficult to see why the ISO rejected the proposal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> > concerns that the U.S. agency could be promoting encryption technology it > knew how to break, rather than the most secure.

If they were going to do this, wouldn't they submit it under a pseudonym?

<comment><USER3> How would that even work? Cryptography is a small world. A submission from someone nobody's heard of would have no chance.

<comment><USER50> NSA has a budget of $12 billion.

Let's not pretend it's some impossible or unheard of feat pushing something through, like getting someone to publish it.

You'd have to be naive to suggest the NSA hasn't compromised any individuals in the security community.

<comment><USER3> The suggestion was that NSA would get someone to submit under a pseudonym, not that they would bribe Orr Dunkelman.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> My problem with this link is that anyone can edit it and it looks like anyone can be an author on the site, so I question the validity of the article.

<comment><USER52> Interesting.

Do you also mistrust Wikipedia? Besides, it is not like every reputed journalist these days maintains basic journalistic standards or integrity. Case in point, article by Reuters from two days ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17057700](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17057700)

<comment><USER51> The schools won't allow my kids to use Wikipedia as a source - so yeah. (this is despite the fact that Wikipedia got more strict with allowing people to comment and that they require references)

You're just mad I didn't trust your article

<comment><USER52> > The schools won't allow my kids to use Wikipedia as a source

Would they allow your kids to use Wikipedia's own sources — as long as they're legitimate — as their sources?

I do not trust traditional journalism as a source either (unlike Wikipedia and most schools). I try to find their sources; and when I can't, I regard it with suspicion.

> You're just mad I didn't trust your article.

This is either incredibly childish or too subtly tongue-in-cheek for me. Neither is the article "mine" in any way, nor was I "mad". I was genuinely curious.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Javascript is now strategic for Microsoft - <AUTHOR> http://clipperhouse.com/blog/post/Javascript-is-now-strategic-for-Microsoft.aspx

<comment><USER2> An important example is when Microsoft launches the web suite for Office 2010 and it potentially runs slowly in older IE versions.

What will also be interesting is how far their backwards compatability travels. Will Microsoft signal the death of IE6 by not supporting their own software in their web Office suite? Unlikely, but interesting regardless.

<comment><USER3> SharePoint 2010 will not support Internet Explorer 6.

Reference: [http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2009/05/07/announci...](http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2009/05/07/announcing- sharepoint-server-2010-preliminary-system-requirements.aspx)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> _In this video, Chris Bryant of Microsoft makes an offhand comment that the components of the new Microsoft Office 2010 for Web are "some of the biggest Javascript applications ever built"_

Yuk, big does not necessarily imply good. From the video, it looks like they've ported as much of the Office applications as possible directly into the browser. The only UI changes are the pieces they had to disregard because the browser didn't support them.

Whatever "web 2.0" is, it isn't the same old applications now running in the browser instead of MFC.

<comment><USER5> When comparing Office 2007 (and 2010) with Office 97 one can clearly see these are not "the same old apps". Especially when combined with the Office Servers.

JavaScript isn't such a bad language. It's essentially Scheme in C cloths. It has first-class functions, lexical closures, prototype-inheritance and more.

Just avoid the bad parts. See this Google Talk by Douglas Crockford <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQVTIJBZook>

<comment><USER6> yes. I always feel like javascript is never learned "the right way". I feel this way because when I first learned it, I was essentially trying to write java code.

I wonder why no one ever tells javascript noobies that functions limit scope, not {} ?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Crazy... anyone have any theories on this? Especially why MS chose JS over Silverlight?

<comment><USER8> The reason to develop Silverlight was to kill flash and compete with Adobe. However, Silverlight hasn't been a big success and it's now obvious that if any technology is going to take over Flash, it's HTML5, CSS3 and JS. It seems the best move to take JS seriously for MS. By the way, Microsoft is hosting the jquery conference to come.

<comment><USER9> Silverlight is competing with flash as planned - read between the lines here - Adobe is concerned with "Doing it right", possibly due to competition. [http://blogs.adobe.com/flex/archives/2009/07/flex_4_beta_upd...](http://blogs.adobe.com/flex/archives/2009/07/flex_4_beta_update_1.html)

Silverlight hasn't taken over yet, and it's too soon to say it's "not a big success" - it looks like it isn't a big failure - from what I heard from Scott Guthrie's public talks, the installed base of SL is on track with MS expectations. SL3 is being pushed quite hard, MS has not given up on it.

It's not obvious that HTML 5 will make Flash/Silverlight obsolete. But it's competition for sure.

It is the nature of MS, being a very large company, when asked to chose between competing technologies, to choose _both_ , so that whichever one wins out, they will be there. Hence, Javascript and Silverlight.

MS has deep pockets, and in both paths is leverage existing assets to cut costs and increase developer familarity - JQuery in Javascript, and .Net and XAML in making silverlight.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> What are the chances of them inserting V8 into IE? Is that completely unthinkable? They've been doing some crazy things lately...

<comment><USER11> It is much more likely that they will use the CLR as a backend.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'll see it before I believe it. I'd be very surprised if they didn't somehow manage to cripple it on non-windows os'es. Sorry for being such a pessimistic old man.

</comment><comment><USER13> Yeah, as I mentioned before, this was the interesting thing about the new Office:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=702707>

</comment><comment><USER14> WOW - Excel running in a Firefox browser (see video on page)</comment>


Incredible skill of old-fashioned fairground signwriter - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-23313762

<comment><USER2> A new documentary 'Sign Painters' is out and touring around North America.[http://signpaintermovie.blogspot.ca](http://signpaintermovie.blogspot.ca)</comment>


Nimble VR: Bring your hands into virtual reality - <AUTHOR> http://nimblevr.com

<comment><AUTHOR> I noticed these guys are fully funded with over a month to go. Can anyone who knows the field tell if this a big improvement over Leap Motion?

[https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/nimblevr/nimble- sense-b...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/nimblevr/nimble-sense-bring- your-hands-into-virtual-reality)</comment>


Do you have anything cool to share with your friends? - <AUTHOR> http://www.borentra.com?utm_source=borentra&utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=hackernews

<comment><USER2> Right...Did you share this idea with your friends?</comment>